o acquire the power of it, and
that the toil involved in wholesome study being greater than the mass of
people have ever given, is also greater than they would ever be willing
to give. Feeling, also, as any real painter feels, that his own
excellence is a gift, no less than the reward of toil, perhaps slightly
disliking to confess the labour it has cost him to perfect it, and
wholly despairing of doing any good by the confession, he
contemptuously leaves the drawing-master to do the best he can in his
twelve lessons, and with courteous unkindness permits the young women of
England to remain under the impression that they can learn to draw with
less pains than they can learn to dance. I have had practical experience
enough, however, to convince me that this treatment of the amateur
student is unjust. Young girls will work with steadiest perseverance
when once they understand the need of labour, and are convinced that
drawing is a kind of language which may for ordinary purposes be learned
as easily as French or German; this language, also, having its grammar
and its pronunciation, to be conquered or acquired only by persistence
in irksome exercise--an error in a form being as entirely and simply an
error as a mistake in a tense, and an ill-drawn line as reprehensible as
a vulgar accent.

159. And I attach great importance to the sound education of our younger
females in art, thinking that in England the nursery and the
drawing-room are perhaps the most influential of academies. We address
ourselves in vain to the education of the artist while the demand for
his work is uncertain or unintelligent; nor can art be considered as
having any serious influence on a nation while gilded papers form the
principal splendour of the reception room, and ill-wrought though costly
trinkets the principal entertainment of the boudoir.

It is surely, therefore, to be regretted that the art-education of our
Government schools is addressed so definitely to the guidance of the
artizan, and is therefore so little acknowledged hitherto by the general
public, especially by its upper classes. I have not acquaintance enough
with the practical working of that system to venture any expression of
opinion respecting its general expediency; but it is my conviction that,
so far as references are involved in it to the designing of patterns
capable of being produced by machinery, such references must materially
diminish its utility considered as a gene